Category: Case Study

Product Development for an Innovative DeFi FinTech Company

Posted on by AccelOne Staff

The Business Requirement

With the evolution of financial transactions to a more distributed (DeFi or decentralized finance) environment, the client provides a new option for the lending market, different from the traditional financial system, initiating a new way of funding projects and business.

The Technical Solution

AccelOne gathered a team of the best engineers and designers in the crypto space, with the most brilliant minds of Latin America, including PhDs in engineering, physics, and mathematics, to create a solid, scalable, and efficient product for our client.

The technology used to create and deploy the client solution included:

  • AWS for the cloud services using Terraform
  • CI / CD within those services
  • Nodejs for the API and integrations
  • Containers
  • ReactJS for the web application
AccelOne created a team to meet the client’s specific needs. The team was made up of the following roles:

  • Chief operations officer
  • Project manager
  • Integration back end engineers
  • Front end team Leader
  • Front end engineers
  • QA automation engineers
  • DevOps
  • UX / UI designers (Fintech oriented)
The development project had several phases, and currently is in production.

The Challenges

  • Flexibility: As crypto business is evolving fast and mutating in several different branches, AccelOne’s team worked in a quite dynamic agile environment, changing and adding features quite frequently.
  • Scalability: The platform is oriented to particular businesses with a small number of high profile transactions, but it is also prepared to scale to a high frequency version when required.
  • Security: This is perhaps the most important topic in FinTech. To achieve a high level of security, the key was focusing on the design and implementation, done with a daily collaboration between designers, engineers, and DevOps. Different levels of security tests are performed periodically.
  • Availability: Based on the same principles of security and scalability, but adding the permanent monitoring services to detect any service shortage in real-time.

The Results

  • The usability of the product (UI) provides a unique simplicity to the users, generating long term engagements.
  • The full production version was recently deployed.
  • AccelOne’s team is growing every month, since more requirements are being created by the customers due to new business opportunities.
  • The user base and transaction volume is growing everyday.
  • AccelOne’s team is improving their engineering and project management practices every day, and adapting to a light speed growing organization.

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AccelOne is an industry leader in custom software development services across the entire software product development lifecycle. AccelOne uses a hybrid approach with experienced onshore/nearshore professionals located in the Americas.

PERSONAL SAFETY APP

Posted on by AccelOne Staff

AccelOne rebuilt the breakthrough personal safety app for iOS and Android, which contains features designed to:

  • Protect users in unsafe areas: If the user feels unsafe, they can open the app and it will begin recording video and the user’s GPS location. The user can tap anywhere on the screen to automatically make a 911 call.
  • Prevent crimes from escalating: Tapping on the screen also sounds an alarm and causes the phone to emit bright light, which draws attention from others and makes it easier for the user to identify their attacker – this alone will cause many criminals to flee.
  • Facilitate contact with emergency response: In addition to calling 911 with one tap, the app also sends a text with the user’s location to pre-set emergency contacts.
  • Facilitate the capture and prosecution of criminals: Videos are stored to the cloud, meaning that even if your device is stolen or destroyed, video evidence of the crime will still be available.
The personal safety app is easy for people of all ages to use, including children.

THE CHALLENGE

The original version of the personal safety app was developed using legacy architecture for the back end and cloud infrastructure. This made the application complex for users to operate, lent a dated appearance to the app, and made use of an inefficient video processing server implementation. This inefficiency led to a slow video processing speed, as well as frequent failures. Some features were not working at all, and the original development team was no longer available to make improvements. The tech company that originally built the app brought on AccelOne to make usability improvements, fix features that were no longer working properly, update libraries and frameworks, and update the programming languages used to the latest versions. AccelOne needed to reverse-engineer the legacy architecture in order to rebuild the back end components.

THE PLAN

AccelOne’s team consisted of four members:

  • Senior iOS Engineer
  • Senior Back End Engineer
  • Technical Project Manager
  • QA Engineer
The project was divided into two phases.

Phase 1:
The goal of phase 1 was to implement immediate, partial updates to both the iOS and Android apps in order to get key features working again. As it was a priority for the creators of the app to fix these features first, AccelOne designed a solution that would allow those fixes to be done as soon as possible, with more complex overhauls handled in phase 2. AccelOne created a new backend using Node.js and Express, which ran in parallel with the original legacy backend, which powered some features but not the entire app. Both backends used the same database. This fix helped get several of the broken features working again, but problems with video processing speed persisted, as well as issues with user signups. The AccelOne team had developed a plan to solve these issues in the second phase.

Phase 2:
After implementing the immediate fixes necessary in phase 1, the back end was fully rewritten in Node.js and Express, and a much more modern architecture for the app infrastructure was created. This improved the app’s performance greatly. To solve the video processing issues, a Node.js-based media server was created. Using Node.js for both the app backend and the media server improved efficiency by streamlining the development process and reducing the likelihood of file corruption or problems with slow processing as videos move from the app to the cloud. The iOS app was migrated to Swift 5. Libraries were updated, and all app screens were tested and prepared to display correctly on the latest iPhone model, which at the time was the iPhone X. Issues with videos and signups in iOS were also corrected. Despite the significant amount of work involved, phase two was completed in only three months.

QA Testing
The Quality Assurance (QA) engineer assigned to the project worked with the development team from beginning to end, testing at every phase in order to ensure the proper functioning of each feature and a smooth launch after each phase. The app has been monitored with a QA framework for crash and bug reporting, and has proven to be stable in all current models of iPhone. The once-problematic video media server has been working without issue, and is providing usage statistics.

RESULTS

AccelOne’s version of the personal safety application proved to be stable, scalable, and resolved the problems of the previous outdated version. The new Node-js-based media server solved all the video processing issues of the previous back end platform, which means that videos are now always available and are processed significantly faster than before. The old application code had been updated to all the newest coding languages and frameworks, making it easier to obtain support for modern versions of mobile operating systems. All features now work as expected, and thanks to these updates, the personal safety app platform is seeing new paying subscriptions every week. Additionally, as the app was updated for the latest model of iPhone, owners of this popular device now have a dramatically improved experience using the app. Because the code base for the app was migrated to the newest versions of its frameworks and languages, both the Android and iOS versions of the app are much more able to support modern versions of mobile operating systems.



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AccelOne is an industry leader in custom software development services across the entire software product development lifecycle. AccelOne uses a hybrid approach with experienced onshore/nearshore professionals located in the Americas.

INTRANET MORTGAGES MANAGER FOR MULTINATIONAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTION

Posted on by AccelOne Staff

THE CHALLENGE

As a major financial institution, effective receipt and processing of loan applications is an essential part of an organization’s ability to keep up with its growing business. For years, our client, a multinational financial institution, had been relying on legacy mainframe applications to support their loan application process, which, over time, became limited in functionality, expediency, and unable to scale with the increasing amount of data quality that was required. Furthermore, because of its antiquated platform, it was becoming harder and harder to find developers to support and maintain the system.

​As a result, our client decided to upgrade its mainframe applications to web applications.

Initially, our client contracted another company that underperformed on the project, generating errors and critical delays that required them to seek out a new team to complete the project.


THE SOLUTION

The chosen solution was a system that would allow lending operators and credit officers to follow all the credit approval processes, from the beginning of a loan application from the prospective borrower, through to the last point of approval to fund the applicant. The process needed to start from the collection of data from the loan candidate, along with relevant relative’s data, through to the time at which the mortgage was granted.

​Our client wanted to keep its core apps of the business in the AS400 and mainframes system for reasons of continuity and protection, but the rest of the systems needed to be revamped, starting with standard back-end interfaces and three-tiered architectures.


THE EXECUTION

In order to achieve the goal of moving all of our client’s applications to the web-based solution, it was necessary to create an architecture and programming standard based on Microsoft .NET platforms and XML messaging between back-end and front-end interfaces, as well as to integrate different and disparate applications used throughout the group seamlessly.

A team of 10 was configured to execute the project, which included a project manager, team leader, architect/DB expert, senior business analyst, (5) senior .NET developers and a senior web designer/UX expert.

The project was divided into modules that followed the logical flow of the application. Milestones were associated with those modules or their respective sections. The first version was released three months after the project had started and provided the first and most complex step of the mortgages tracking process. The main purpose of this version was to perform QA on a real-world data sample and evaluate the tool and its User Experience (UX). The second version was released after six months and was deployed immediately for use.


THE RESULTS

After six months, a fully functional version was deployed for immediate use and regionalized to several different countries in which the financial institutions maintains operating facilities.

​Based on the further discovery of the commercial loan officer’s daily work requirements, a third version of the product was released, which further improved both the UX and performance.

This loan application product continues to be used to this day.



Client Success

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AccelOne is an industry leader in custom software development services across the entire software product development lifecycle. AccelOne uses a hybrid approach with experienced onshore/nearshore professionals located in the Americas.

AccelOne is an industry leader in custom software development services across the entire software product development lifecycle. AccelOne uses a hybrid approach with experienced onshore/nearshore professionals located in the Americas.

AccelOne is an industry leader in custom software development services across the entire software product development lifecycle. AccelOne uses a hybrid approach with experienced onshore/nearshore professionals located in the Americas.

AccelOne is an industry leader in custom software development services across the entire software product development lifecycle. AccelOne uses a hybrid approach with experienced onshore/nearshore professionals located in the Americas.

AccelOne is an industry leader in custom software development services across the entire software product development lifecycle. AccelOne uses a hybrid approach with experienced onshore/nearshore professionals located in the Americas.

AccelOne is an industry leader in custom software development services across the entire software product development lifecycle. AccelOne uses a hybrid approach with experienced onshore/nearshore professionals located in the Americas.

AccelOne is an industry leader in custom software development services across the entire software product development lifecycle. AccelOne uses a hybrid approach with experienced onshore/nearshore professionals located in the Americas.

AccelOne is an industry leader in custom software development services across the entire software product development lifecycle. AccelOne uses a hybrid approach with experienced onshore/nearshore professionals located in the Americas.

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